


What candles may be held

by distractionpie



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Aging, Birthday, Gen, Introspection, Snippets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-06
Updated: 2019-12-06
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:07:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21685765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/distractionpie/pseuds/distractionpie
Summary: Graduating from being the baby of the team is both an honour and burden, neither of which Petra knows how to bear.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15





	What candles may be held

Eren joining the squad unsettles her.

Not because of the titan thing (okay, a little because of the titan thing, she’s only human after all), she’d understood that joining the squad meant trusting Levi’s judgement and that, while there was no suggestion of safety, he wouldn’t risk them unnecessarily.

No, the thing about Eren is that he’s young.

She knows he’s here as an experiment, and to be experimented on, but despite his strange status they’ve been told to treat him as part of the unit and for all of them that means accepting a potential enemy in their ranks, but for Petra it also means she’s no longer the youngest of the team.

It’s a complicated role.

Being part of the special operations squad was an honour and a responsibility, something to live up to. She’d known she’d have to be smart and responsible, show that she’d been picked because she was competent, that she could keep up with the honoured veterans whose ranks she’d been invited into.

Then she’d been on her first mission with them.

The corrections had been worse than training. They picked at her constantly, pointing out every flaw in her manoeuvres, pulling her up on her form, and claiming she didn’t maintain her gear thoroughly enough. By the time they’d made it back to base, she’d been sure they were trying to bully her out.

But she hadn’t made it so far by being a shrinking violet, and so she’d put in extra hours of training and made a written schedule for upkeep of every piece of equipment she’d been issued.

And on the next trip out, they’d nagged at her again. Too slow, overly cautious of hitting or getting in the way of the team as if they weren’t more than capable of outmanoeuvring her, too focused on single titans and not seeing the bigger picture.

But those were different complaints, and she could prove those wrong too.

It had taken until their fifth mission for her to recognise that their nit-picking was their indirect way of sharing their experience and teaching her what she needed to keep up.

It had still rankled. She’d been offered her place in Levi’s squad because she excelled as a scout and it had felt like mockery to find herself coddled again after shaking off her reputation as middling trainee and the embarrassment of how frightened she’d been on her early missions as a scout, working to find a place that suited her talents.

But it was good advice.

So she’d listened and she’d learned and it was still frustrating but now she knew that they didn’t hate her it was easier to see all the ways the looked out for her, not just the instructions or even watching her back in combat but in egging her on when she snapped back at their verbal jabs, turning the dynamic from taunting to comradely banter, and including her even when they weren’t on missions, even though serving under Levi meant that most of their off duty activities were cleaning (and watch Levi tear into sloppy looking recruits put a whole new angle on all the times Eld made comments on the state of her uniform). They treated her differently, yes, but only in the capacity of her role as the combined newbie and youngest of the team, not out of personal disrespect or dislike and not because she was the only woman, which seemed to matter less in the survey corps than it did in the regiments that operated inside the walls, where there were people like her grandfather telling tales of a time when women didn’t fight – back when they hadn’t needed every soldier they could get to keep the titans at bay.

And now it’s Eren’s to take on that role.

Except so far, there’s been none of that.

It’s hard to treat him as the baby of the group, teasing and teaching in turn, while always being on guard for the moment he loses control and tries to kill them all.

But he is just a kid and she’s not the rookie anymore, she’s going to follow Levi’s order to treat Eren like team, and you look out for the new recruit.

“Hey, Eren,” she says, proud of how her voice doesn’t tremble. He’d a dangerous kid but he’s still a kid, he needs to be able to look up to the authority figures in his life and she’s one of those now. She’s not sure she wants to risk making him angry by taunting him and she’s still the second newest member of the team so she doesn’t have the experience the others can offer, but there has to be some things she can teach him. “How are you doing on learning the formations? You’re going to have to pick them up at lot faster in this squad than most survey corps recruits do.”

“I… I think I’m doing okay?”

The rookie can turn into a titan and he looks nervous of her. But he’s all alone here, without even the company of fellow recruits although hopefully some of the kids from his class will pick survey so it won’t stay that way. For now though,

“Well then, I’d guess you’d best study with me after dinner.”

He looks far more like a child than a titan when he smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> Very rough lil thematic Petra snipped in honour of our shared birthday.
> 
> Title is half a line from Anthem for Doomed Youth.


End file.
